The Potsdam Eye Clinic as
a partner in sports

In sports, vision serves for orientation, for controlling one's own movements, for anti­cipating and registering external move­ments, and - from the perspective of the sports instructor, coach, or re­feree - for observing and evaluating movements.

Surveys in various sports show that appro­xi­mately 30% of all athletes practice their sport with poor vision (i.e., without the necessary visual aids or with insufficient cor­rec­tion). De­pen­ding on the sport, this also applies to competitive sports. Approxi­ma­tely 30% of top athletes examined as part of visual per­for­mance diagnostics must be classified as visually impaired and sub­se­quent­ly provided with adequate correction.

When considering the optical cor­rec­tion op­tions of glasses or contact lenses, it must be noted that wearing glasses is a hin­drance in most sports. How­ever, wearing contact lenses also causes problems for many athletes.

The following problems, among others, were frequently reported by the athletes we looked after:

• Glasses slipping due to increased sweating
• Contact lenses slipping, especially in situa­tions requiring maximum con­cen­tra­tion, irritates athletes, e.g., in pole vaulting
• Contact lenses “freezing” in dry air and extremely low temperatures, e.g., in Northern Europe or Salt Lake City in 2002, e.g., in cross-country skiing
• Extreme centrifugal forces, e.g. in skeleton, can cause contact lenses to “pop” out of the eye.

Some of the reports from the ath­letes who come to us are quite surprising, as we were not familiar with them before. In order to put ourselves in the ath­letes' shoes, employees from our clinic regularly attend com­pe­ti­tions in a wide variety of sports. One particular high­light was our (active) participation in the 2006 Skeleton Cup in Altenberg.